was not an aim in itself, but a necessary condition for organising society in the
desired manner.48 A tremendous hunger for information was the result and the
consequences of this are still visible in the archives.
Colonial information in a growing bureaucracy
One of the most important tools of power for governing and controlling the
colonial empire was the power of writing. The pen could be 'as mighty as the
sword in the making of the empire'.49 By the ever-increasing demand for
information, to be collected by the colonial civil servants, the early colonial
state expected to be able to exert control. So far, the paperwork bureaucracy
has received relatively little attention from historians and archivists, although
there are a few interesting exceptions. In his dissertation, the Dutch-South
African scholar Siegfried Huigen, who specialised in linguistics and cultures,
pays considerable attention to the changes following the disintegration of the
Dutch VOC trading company and the transformation towards the new state
structure. He suggests that the Dutch Batavian colonial administration needed
new kinds of information because it wanted to consider itself an administration
that wanted to promote the well-being of fellow citizens (meaning the colonists,
and not the indigenous people). This could only be done effectively if the
administrators knew how their citizens lived. To get an administrative grip on
distant regions of the colony, it was crucial to have information concerning
the local situation. This information was mainly acquired by highly placed civil
servants going on investigative journeys, and by making extensive surveys and
topographical maps.50 In the 19th century, the state's administrative passion
increased further to a position where everything that could be recorded, actually
seemed to be registered.51
For a much longer time, the British had seen the significance of information
for the colonial administration. For instance, C.A. Bayly describes how at the
start of the 19th century the transition was made in British-governed India from
a decentralised and orally based Indian information system towards a more
structured and archive-based British system. He shows how native and colonial
circuits were linked to each other and emphasises the move of information and
the process of acquiring information through existing and created networks.52
H.V. Bowen reconstructs the inner workings of the British East India Company
in the late 18th and early 19th century. In his chapter 'Methods: an empire
in writing' he sketches the intimate relationship that existed between the
information gathering in and of an unknown world and meticulous records
COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA -
THE DUTCH ARCHIVES
48 Jeurgens en Klep, Informatieprocessen van de Bataafs-Franse overheid.
49 Bowen, The business of empire, 181.
50 Siegfried Huigen, Knowledge and colonialism, 216-217.
51 See for instance J.A.A. van Doorn, De laatste eeuw van Indië. Notorious were for instance the so-called dessa
registrations, to be kept by heads of the villages. In some areas the indigenous officials should keep between
50 and 100 different registrations. Because of this unlimited counting and registering by the authorities
we still know for instance about the 76,151 lashes that were given in a certain year to criminals in the area
around Surabaya, or the exact amount of coffee trees that were planted each year in Java or the amount of
rats that were trapped per week.
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